


Reconcile

by anactoriatalksback



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Play, Come Eating, Established Relationship, Felching, Implied Anal Sex, M/M, Mirror Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon Fix-It, Rimming, Sort of anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:21:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24340474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoriatalksback/pseuds/anactoriatalksback
Summary: Francis has been given an ornate mirrored table. James finds a way to reconcile him to it.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 26
Kudos: 97





	Reconcile

Lady Maxwell meant well with her gift. An intricately-wrought mahogany table, topped by scalloped gold glass that gleams like the ice of the Poles had trapped the setting sun itself. What better gift for a man so newly-returned from the Arctic than this jewel of Burr’s collection?

‘You could have said no,’ says James, watching Francis scowl at his own reflection in its surface. A disgruntled flame-haired Vulcan.

‘How?’ says Francis, and admittedly Lady Maxwell puts James powerfully to mind of an iceberg: immovable, ponderous and implacable.

‘It’s rather beautiful,’ says James, walking over to study it. His own face looks back at him, worn a little but fuller after months of beefsteak pudding and home-brewed. His eyes and mouth have a hard-won steadiness.

Francis emits an inelegant snort. ‘You’re looking at the table when you say that, are you?’

James flushes, a little, but doesn’t look away. He raises his hand to his cravat and straightens it, very deliberately. ‘I could pay more attention to the legs of the table, if you prefer, but I rather thought the point of a mirror - ’

‘ – Was to look at yourself,’ Francis says, and James sees him approach. ‘I don’t blame you,’ says Francis, ‘we both know what looks back at us when we look in a mirror, James, and we both do exactly as we should with that knowledge.’

James frowns. ‘Francis, you know I dislike it when - ’

‘Whisht now,’ says Francis, and presses a kiss to his shoulder. ‘I know what I look like, and I know I’d rather look at you. I’ll not be giving out to you for doing the same. If I had you looking back at me every time I looked in a mirror, I’d do naught else.’

James watches his own hand rise to cradle Francis’s cheek. Watches Francis press into the touch. ‘You can see me now.’

‘I can that,’ says Francis, turning his head to stare at James’s reflection.

‘Does it reconcile you to the table?’

He likes to watch Francis hold on to the tattered remnants of his sullens, while an errant smile tugs at the corners of his lips. ‘I don’t need a table to look at you.’

‘You don’t,’ James says, and brings Francis’s hand to his lips. ‘But, if you’ll give me leave, I think I have another notion.’

* * *

In a storied career, James has had a number of ideas. Some of these have been inspired (leaping fully-clothed into the Mersey to rescue a drowning man whose name he cannot remember) and others have been the counsel of desperate folly (leaping fully clothed into the Mersey to rescue a drowning man whose name he cannot remember). His lunacy has tended to be rewarded _post_ _facto_ , so James has entirely given up trying to distinguish a good idea from a bad one.

This idea, however? He knows exactly what to call it.

James, at the moment, has his cheek pressed against the gleaming golden glass of Francis’s new table. His panting breaths send wet clouds skittering and vanishing across its surface. If he lifts his head and looks, he can see the sinuous, sluttish cant of his hips, raised high for his Captain’s pleasure and his own. His cock, red and hard, leaves smears of clear fluid on the mirror.

Francis didn’t need much persuading to have James on the floor. He was a little alarmed when James asked him to withdraw just after he’d spent, but James pressed a kiss to his temple that he hoped reassured him.

It took a little doing, and a muscular rigour James hasn’t needed to exercise for years, to inch his way over to the table and clamber atop it while clenching his arse. But James contrived it, and contrived besides to slide across the length of the mirrored surface, tilting up his arse in offering and supplication. He spread his knees, looked down at himself, and pushed.

Francis’s spend trickled out of him, slow and warm, a teasing trail down his bollocks and thighs, wending its way inexorably down to the shining gold table.

James heard a long, high, hurt-sounding gasp, and when he glanced back Francis had tears in his eyes.

‘Francis?’

Francis’s eyes met his, wild, almost terrified. And then Francis was upon him, hands hot and shaking against James’s thighs.

‘Please,’ said Francis, and ‘Please,’ said James. And he heard Francis’s knees hit the carpet with a soft _thump_ and felt his breath upon his flesh and lowered his forehead to the cool of the glass.

Francis is plying his tongue now, open and greedy. James can see the slick sheen of his own thighs, laved with fierce care by Francis, using his thumbs to press his release out of James’s hole and tracking its progress with an explorer’s assiduity. He’s used his fingers to scoop up his release and feed it back into James, who’s obligingly expelled it again at the wordless urging of Francis’s thumbs and fingers. And now he’s following the trickle with his tongue, curling it against the soft inside of James’s thigh to catch it, and retrace the path with finicking precision. If James cranes his head he can see the flash of red-gold against the pallor of his own body as he feels the tickle of his hair against his own soft flesh.

‘F-Francis,’ he pants, ‘you – you need to _see_.’

He sees a glimpse of Francis’s reflection, of the muscles of that pale throat work as he swallows. And then Francis says, in the slurring rasp James has only ever heard from him after the best of a decanter of whisky, ‘I told you. I’d rather look at you.’

James has always felt Francis’s eyes on him. It’s a gift he attributed to his guardian angel, an unusually advanced capacity for self-preservation. In recent days (weeks (moons)) he’s sent up thanks for the knowledge for entirely different reasons.

James doesn’t need a mirror to know Francis is looking at him. He feels the starveling weight of it on his skin like a brand.

He stretches again, lets himself rub his thighs against Francis’s head. Smiles against the glass at the soft noise that Francis makes. Gasps at the warning nip against the place where his buttock meets his thighs.

Francis presses a kiss to the spot to soothe, and then attaches his mouth firmly to James’s hole, and sucks.

James can see the yaw and sway of his thighs as he pushes back against Francis’s mouth, he can see the shape of his mouth as he pants and pleads. Francis’s tongue is wriggling inside him, slippery and wet, utterly single-minded. There are little white indentations like clefs on his thighs. There will be marks tomorrow, thinks James, giddily.

‘More,’ he hears from his own throat, hot damp gusts against the glass. ‘More, Francis, more, I - ’

Francis hums against him and draws away with a profligately filthy sound. In the glass James can see the arch of that thrice-bedamned eyebrow. And then Francis returns to James’s hole, and feasts.

And for a few moments, or a few aeons, James cannot consider his reflection because there is a voracious and precise onslaught upon him, there is the rasp of Francis’s stubble against the tender skin of his thigh, there is the grasp of Francis’s fingers, the gluttonous drag and swipe and thrust of his tongue.

And distantly, he feels the quake of his thighs, feels rather than hear the approving groan of Francis against his hole, as his cock jerks and he spills, lavishly, in hot white gouts, against the pristine golden glass.

He slumps upon the table when he has finished, feeling ripe and well-used. He hears a chuckle, and then a hand in his hair, lifting it gently but inexorably up.

‘It’s the very broth of a boy you are, James,’ says Francis, his eyes soft and pleased. ‘But look at the mess you’ve made of my table.’

‘Here’s a how-d’ye-do,’ says James, ‘you’ve changed your tune. I thought you hated it.’

‘It’s grown on me,’ says Francis, dry and precise as ice. ‘And I’ll thank you to clean it up.’

James looks into Francis’s eyes and smiles. He unfurls himself, loose-limbed and lazy, his cock nestling soft against his thigh. He moves backwards until his face hovers over the pool of white on the table. And then he lowers his head and licks.

Francis lets out a soft sigh, but James doesn’t lift his head to see. He’s been given an order, and he intends to see it through.

When he’s finished, and the surface of the table is winking back at him, polished and gleaming, he slides off the table and reaches for Francis. They kiss, easy and wet and open, Francis’s tongue seeking out James’s spend and sucking it into his own mouth.

They lie on the carpet, James half-atop Francis, leg thrown over him. Francis’s fingers wander down to James’s hole, and James smiles against Francis’s chest. He knows the shape of this particular curiosity well, knows it’s never quite satisfied.

He bites his lip at the obscene squelch of two thick fingers entering and leaving his hole.

‘You – you know,’ he says, rocking softly down as his cock stirs, protesting, ‘I – I could help you – _oh_ – I could help r – reconcile you. To. Other things you possess.’

‘Oh?,’ says Francis, and he presses a kiss to James’s neck. ‘My sopha?’

‘Oh, yes – _yes, Francis, there_ – yes.’

‘My bed?’

‘Oh, un – ngggghhhhhh – undoubtedly.’

And as Francis – voice cracking – lists items and surfaces, each more outlandish than the last, James writhes and gasps against his mouth _Yes, Francis, yes_.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr handle is [itsevidentvery](https://itsevidentvery.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to come yell with me there.
> 
> A handy-dandy rebloggable link for this fic is [here](https://itsevidentvery.tumblr.com/post/618931714079817728/reconcile-anactoriatalksback-the-terror-tv) if you are so inclined.


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